Libya – The DC/NATO Agenda and the Next Great War

In the 1930s the US, Great Britain, and the Netherlands set a course for World War II in the Pacific by conspiring against Japan. The three governments seized Japan’s bank accounts in their countries that Japan used to pay for imports and cut Japan off from oil, rubber, tin, iron and other vital materials. Was Pearl Harbor, Japan’s response?

Now Washington and its NATO puppets are employing the same strategy against China.

Protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Yemen arose from the people protesting against Washington’s tyrannical puppet governments. However, the protests against Gaddafi, who is not a Western puppet, appear to have been organized by the CIA in the eastern part of Libya where the oil is and where China has substantial energy investments.

Eighty percent of Libya’s oil reserves are believed to be in the Sirte Basin in eastern Libya now controlled by rebels supported by Washington. As seventy percent of Libya’s GDP is produced by oil, a successful partitioning of Libya would leave Gaddafi’s Tripoli-based regime impoverished.

The People’s Daily Online (March 23) reported that China has 50 large-scale projects in Libya. The outbreak of hostilities has halted these projects and resulted in 30,000 Chinese workers being evacuated from Libya. Chinese companies report that they expect to lose hundreds of millions of yuan.

China is relying on Africa, principally Libya, Angola, and Nigeria, for future energy needs. In response to China’s economic engagement with Africa, Washington is engaging the continent militarily with the US African Command (AFRICOM) created by President George W. Bush in 2007. Forty-nine African countries agreed to participate with Washington in AFRICOM, but Gaddafi refused, thus creating a second reason for Washington to target Libya for takeover.

A third reason for targeting Libya is that Libya and Syria are the only two countries with Mediterranean sea coasts that are not under the control or influence of Washington. Suggestively, protests also have broken out in Syria. Whatever Syrians might think of their government, after watching Iraq’s fate and now Libya’s it is unlikely that Syrians would set themselves up for US military intervention. Both the CIA and Mossad are known to use social networking sites to foment protests and to spread disinformation. These intelligence services are the likely conspirators that the Syrian and Libyan governments blame for the protests.

Caught off guard by protests in Tunisia and Egypt, Washington realized that protests could be used to remove Gaddafi and Assad. The humanitarian excuse for intervening in Libya is not credible considering Washington’s go-ahead to the Saudi military to crush the protests in Bahrain, the home base for the US Fifth Fleet.

If Washington succeeds in overthrowing the Assad government in Syria, Russia would lose its Mediterranean naval base at the Syrian port of Tartus. Thus, Washington has much to gain if it can use the cloak of popular rebellion to eject both China and Russia from the Mediterranean. Rome’s mare nostrum (“our sea”) would become Washington’s mare nostrum.

“Gaddafi must go,” declared Obama. How long before we also hear, “Assad must go?”

The American captive press is at work demonizing both Gaddafi and Assad, an eye doctor who returned to Syria from London to head the government after his father’s death.

The hypocrisy passes unremarked when Obama calls Gaddafi and Assad dictators. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the American president has been a Caesar. Based on nothing more than a Justice Department memo, George W. Bush was declared to be above US statutory law, international law, and the power of Congress as long as he was acting in his role as commander-in-chief in the “war on terror.”

Caesar Obama has done Bush one step better. Caesar Obama has taken the US to war against Libya without even the pretense of asking Congress for authorization. This is an impeachable offense, but an impotent Congress is unable to protect its power. By accepting the claims of executive authority, Congress has acquiesced to Caesarism. The American people have no more control over their government than do people in countries ruled by dictators.

Washington’s quest for world hegemony is driving the world toward World War III. China is no less proud than was Japan in the 1930s and is unlikely to submit to being bullied and governed by what China regards as the decadent West. Russia’s resentment to its military encirclement is rising. Washington’s hubris can lead to fatal miscalculation.

Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail], a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House.

One Response to “Libya – The DC/NATO Agenda and the Next Great War”

Commentary: Chinese takeaway
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
UPI Editor at Large

WASHINGTON, April 19 (UPI) — While World Bank President Robert Zoellick warns that the world is “one shock away from a full-blown crisis,” China has broken ground and taken over the economic future of a country whose nearest island to the U.S. mainland is Bimini, only 50 miles away.

The Nassau Guardian editorialized: “The Bahamas has fallen fully into the embrace of China . And the rising empire has been kind with its gifts … What Bahamians must understand is that when China lends, and it contracts its own workers to do the job, a significant amount of the money borrowed goes back to China with the workers who build the project. They pay their workers with money we borrow … The Chinese also keep their workers in self-contained on-site camps when they are sent abroad. We barely get them to visit our stores to spend the money we borrowed when they are working in our countries.”

When China invests in developing countries, Chinese labor is part of a “no-ticky-no-laundry” deal. A Chinese construction company recently broke ground for Baha Mar, a $3 billion gambling project on Cable Beach , 15 minutes from Nassau ‘s international airport and 30 minutes from downtown Nassau . China originally said it would require 8,150 of its own workers on site. The Bahamian government complained the influx was discombobulating the local labor market and they compromised on 6,150-strong Chinese labor force.

Some 4,000 Bahamians will also work for the four-hotel, 3,000-room Baha Mar complex, including condos and a Jack Nicklaus signature golf course.

Baha Mar, scheduled to open in December 2014, will be the Caribbean’s largest casino, one area where China trumped Las Vegas a decade ago. Macau , the former Portuguese peninsula colony, overtook “Lost Wages” a decade ago and is now the world’s biggest gambling mart.

With revenues up 58 percent to $30 billion, three times the size of the Las Vegas take, Macau offers a choice of 24 casinos, 2,762 gaming tables and 6,546 slot machines.

The Venetian Macau Resort is the world’s largest with more floor space than four Empire State Buildings.

The number of Chinese workers abroad in projects underwritten by China was estimated at 3.5 million in 2005. It is now 5.8 million. In Africa , there are about 1 million Chinese laborers, businessmen and miscellaneous “temporary residents.” In Angola alone, the number is 100,000. Nigeria has 50,000. All for temporary jobs local labor isn’t qualified to handle.

In Algeria , some 40,000 Chinese built the country’s first national shopping mall, its largest prison, two luxury hotels and a 745-mile highway from Morocco to Tunisia . Some $20 billion in Algerian government contracts are in the pipeline out of which flows payment in oil.

China ‘s on-site workers get free room and board and each sends home an average of $1,000 a month, for an estimated total of $70 billion in 2009 alone.

Spread over 100,000 square miles of ocean, only 30 of the 700 Bahamian islands are inhabited but they stretch from 50 miles east of Florida to within 50 miles of Cuba , Haiti and the Dominican Republic .

China is getting far more worldwide influence from its sovereign investment fund than the United States got from a $1 trillion war in Iraq and a half-trillion-dollar war in Afghanistan — with several more years to go. With the interest on the money the United States owes China — $1.3 trillion in trade debt — the Chinese are winning friends and influencing people at breakneck speed.

The U.S. property fiasco is in stark contrast to China ‘s building boom from Macau to Mozambique and from Algeria to Angola . While the United States wrestles with extending the national debt limit past the $15 trillion level as well as reducing the deficit by $4 trillion, there is also the conundrum of how best to manage the $1.3 trillion we owe China’s 1.3 billion people.

China ‘s problem is coping with a rate of growth of 10.3 percent that is easing back to plus 9.7 percent this year. And the China Investment Corp.’s $300 billion investment fund has trouble keeping up with worldwide demand for infrastructure projects.

China clearly sees a permanent foothold in the Caribbean in its geopolitical future. The U.S. Embassy in Barbados is responsible for half a dozen island nations — Anguilla , Antigua and Barbuda , British Virgin Islands , Dominica , Grenada , Guadeloupe/Martinique, St. Barts, St. Kitts — where the United States has no diplomatic representation. China has an ambassador or a consul in seven of them; the United States not one.

In the Bahamas , Hong Kong’s Hutchison-Whampoa owns the Freeport Container Port; the Freeport Harbour Co.; the Grand Bahama Airport , which boasts the largest private aviation facility in the world; and the Our Lucaya Resort.

In Nassau , the Chinese are building a $10 million chancery to handle the influx of Chinese labor. China is also spending $70 million on improving Nassau ‘s international airport.

China estimates the Baha Mar complex over the next 20 years will result in $5 billion in incremental tax revenue and a cumulative $11.2 billion to Bahamas domestic product. By then, too, China should be irreversibly entrenched in the strategic archipelago.

Among the recent outreach of the world’s most populous nation: a new broadcasting center now going up on Times Square in New York, part of a $7 billion investment in “global propaganda,” reports The Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Crovitz. VOA and BBC, meanwhile, are slashing Chinese language programs and dozens of other foreign language newscasts.

The dumbest move of all in the Obama administration is to put the VOA’s Arabic programs on the chopping block as the Arab world belches revolution from Algeria to Libya to Egypt to Syria to Bahrain .

“We are in an information war and we are losing it,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified recently. Then please do something about it. The cost of a couple of F-16s could do the trick.